Created by Alec Berg & Bill Hader
Written by Emma Barrie
Directed by Alec Berg
Starring Bill Hader, Sarah Goldberg, Stephen Root, Anthony Carrigan and Henry Winkler
New episodes airing Sundays on HBO

by Alex Rudolph, Staff Writer

I'll be honest with you - I am a simple fool, and the different plot threads in Barry are getting a little difficult for me to follow. Sally (Sarah Goldberg), Barry (Bill Hader), Gene (Henry Winkler), Fuches (Stephen Root) and NoHo Hank (Anthony Carrigan) all have overlapping stories, but they're also all doing wildly different things.

Barry and Gene's plots are the most connected. As this episode begins, they're in makeup for Laws of Humanity, the TV show Barry got them both booked on. Laws of Humanity's showrunner knew Gene in a past life, when the showrunner was a PA on Murder, She Wrote and Gene attacked him for presenting an omlette with chives. That isn't killing a person, but, as with last episode, we're getting more peeks at Gene's volatility. He doesn't deserve to live in the world Barry's created for him, a world Barry is convinced is perfectly balanced now that he got Gene a line in a bad TV show, but he's still an asshole. If he seems normal, it's because he isn't a sociopathic killer, just a moody actor who attacks PAs.

Sally, once directly connected to Barry, is now moving parallel to him. We haven't seen the two characters together in person since Barry blew up at her last episode, and neither character mentions it in this one. The only evidence we have that it happened is the troubled dent it's left on Sally's screen daughter Katie's comfortability. (Katie's played wonderfully by Elsie Fisher, who's apparently going to be in a movie about The Shaggs. Expect more devastating show biz weirdness when that movie comes out as you watch Elsie's screen dad force her to make outsider art!). Natalie (D'Arcy Carden) cluelessly tries to ease Katie's stress by explaining that Barry used to yell at everybody in acting class and it was fine. He told them he killed people and he was a good actor, so the process works.

It's the excuse everybody gives for terrible people-- they made awful choices but it fueled their art. Katie's young enough, smart enough, or both, to not buy it. She thinks Barry's going to do somebody. But she's sitting through a press junket with Sally and, when asked about Barry by an interviewer, lies and says Sally's in a great relationship now. (The junket sees Sally say Ben Mendelsohn should be the next Spider-Man, which is a next-level great joke.)

NoHo Hank and the Chechans are going to "activate the patsy" in retaliation against the Bolivians, who just tried to kill them. The patsy is, of course, Fuches, now in Chechnya, herding goats. But he'd rather stay with the goats. He loves his life and only starts to blow it up after a phone call with Barry, who isn't properly reverential. Fuches decides to come back to America to kill Barry.

The Bolivians are heading home - Cristobal's father-in-law says, "We gave LA a shot, it didn't work out," and promises to send everybody back to Europe after lunch at Johnny Rockets. It's such a casual, quick decision that you can assume it'll be reversed just as quickly as it was made.

With everybody going in different directions, it's important to note that they almost all have the same objective: The need to feel needed. Barry needs Gene to need him, Sally needs the affirmation her show Joplin might bring, Fuches is ready to put an army together to wipe Barry out, just for the recognition he'll get when he looks in Barry's eyes and his old employee maybe feels sorry for a second. And at the end of the episode, when Barry can't feel needed by Gene, he offers to do a job for Hank, maybe because Hank seems enthusiastic and Barry needs that energy, to feel wanted, or because Barry knows being an effective killer will make him feel better about himself. Whatever the motivation, he's filling an emotional hole, and now he's going to deliver a bomb to the Bolivians because he knows that killing well makes him the version of himself that people need. Nobody demands Barry the actor, but Barry the hitman gets jobs all day.

Recovery isn't a linear path, but it's distressing how far Barry's fallen. He's in a worse place than he was when the show started, two seasons of work wiped away. Nobody's particularly likeable right now, but Barry's especially difficult to feel any warmth toward. It's hard to see how he gets out of this, how Barry the show recaptures the balance needed to make Barry the character somebody you can root for. And I don't need to root for people in art. I love unlikeable protagonists. Barry's are more complicated, though. I've been watching them all progress since 2018. The show was, for a long time, about that progression. The shift this season has thrown me. It's still a great piece of art, but it's harder to assess on an episode-by-episode basis. The story is too big and too complicated to predict what exactly it's trying to say right now.